Smart retail Technology

1. Smart Retail Digital Transformation of Retail Business

2. Introduction Smart Retail refers to the smart technologies that are developed through Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), to give the customer a better shopping experience. Smart retail solutions help to build an effective and better understanding of the customer in-store experience according to the customer’s taste, need, interest, purchase habits in real-time which makes the retailers provide consummately meeting customer expectations. Retail is going through a massive transformation in multiple fronts. Online Stores are racing ahead with several advantages compared to Offline stores. The data collected by the online stores about the buyers is becoming a huge advantage to target products and to come up with merchandise that is likely to address the general set of buyers visiting the online store. 

3. Digital Transformation in Retail 1 2 3 4 Why Smart Retail To compete offline stores now are going through digital transformation addressing multiple segments with mobile applications, etc. The next phase is to get buyer patterns, similar to the online store.to give a better shopping experience and also to increase retail business. Offline stores have an advantage in this respect that they have real customers but there is a technology gap in a system solution to address this easily. Gyrus presents a solution that addresses this requirement by fusing information from Camera, Point of Sale (POS) and Customer Location (LOC) to enable Smart Retail Stores. 

4. Camera based Analytics With the advancement of vision algorithms, cameras and the associated AI hardware provide a lot of insights about the environment. Even more, Object detection, face recognition, sentiment analysis, demographic classification algorithms matured and are being used in real-life deployments.  Alternatively, Cameras at entrance and Exit can be used to identify Demographics of the visitor Rewards customer Frequent visitor Cross check POS with checked out items.

5. Features of Smart Retail 1. Camera-Based Analytics – Digital Analytics for Retail 2. Point of Sale (POS) – Software for Smart Retail Management 3. Smart Retail Heatmaps – In-Store Retail Analytics Report 4. Customer demographic Metrics – Location tracking Technology 5. Automatic scanning of products - Smart Check out 6. Anti-theft Management.

6. Few Technologies used 1 2 3 Point of Sale POS / Consumer Location POS systems should be able to provide informationregarding the products purchased, discounts/coupons applied, loyalty rewards, etc. Wi-Fi technology introduced Fine Time Measurement (FTM) for getting more accurate location measurements. Advanced methods are layered on top such as Channel Estimate based Time of Flight measurements and Trilateration Technologies to have much-improved location metrics. today it is conceivable to have decimeter-level (20 cm) accurate location of the user devices. The previous generation WiFi-APs used BLE, or antenna arrays for location, and dense deployment making it very expensive, while these new methods can be deployed with software running on standard WiFi AP’s. Info: As an added advantage, cameras can provide security and surveillance. Camera software can alert if someone enters (or is walking outside) the store with a weapon.

7. Fusing the three vectors to generate heatmaps based on location Taking in data from the three technologies, offline stores provides very valuable insights at par with online stores such as heat maps below. Certainly, based on the time spent by user at each product location, their demographics, and the reconciliation with the POS system, one can provide –

8. Heatmap Generation based on Location • Foot Traffic to Store Traffic rate • Time Spent by per Aisle  • Time Spent per product section • Conversion Ratio • Conversion to Time Spent • Business Lost Ratio • Business Lost to Time Spent • Marketability of the Merchandise • Product placement effectiveness • Effectiveness of discounts • Time spent in Mark-Down section  • Conversion ratio in the Mark-Down section • Demographic wise statistics of Business gained/lost • Effectiveness of loyalty program • VIP Customer Identification • Effectiveness of Digital Signage • Customer-ID to online ID mapping • Targeting advertisements • Customer Heatmaps • Queue Monitoring • Zone Analysis • People Counting • Shopper Flow

9. Conclusion Above all, the online retail companies are threatening offline stores with respect to inventory level, the margin of business, the requirement for less labor, etc. The latest battle is with respect to data about buyer profiles and patterns. Also, online stores develop rich buyer models and personas to target advertisements and provide custom merchandise to lure them to buying. Moreover, Offline stores can have similar information and can do better targeting and with new technologies as presented in this blog. However, the Same level or better information can be available to the offline stores to help them compete better. A mesh of Cameras everywhere is expensive, very intrusive and might thwart some customers. Even more, Intelligently fusing the Wi-Fi sensing, POS systems with Cameras just at the entrance and exits, intelligence can be brought to offline stores at par with the online stores.  Gyrus ML/AI algorithms can be used to fuse the data and also to derive all the insights presented above.